For some reason or another I was reading up on the history of Infocom recently. They used to make text based adventure games, aka Interactive Fiction. Remember Zork? Hitchhiker’s? Those were Infocom games.

I was pleased to find that while the commercial prospects of the genre are nill, there is a large and devoted group of people who develop games in some quite sophisticated development environments. One such IDE is called Inform and seems to be one of the most popular.

So, I had this idea. I’d make an Interactive Fiction game. The setting? Austin. At first I was going to make it a typical game (with puzzles, etc), but then I came up with another idea. Could this medium not also be used as a way to introduce people to the area? Photographs and stories are helpful, but an Interactive Fiction story would allow people to explore the world, kind of like a “choose your own adventure” but without any real end-goal.

You would be able to “walk around” and explore different areas. It’s combining the knowledge you might find in a Wiki with the exploration of an open-ended game. I like the idea of it being text based, because then much more is left to the imagination (like a book).

Thinking about it more, it feels to me somewhat like my holy grail of knowledge: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. There is so much information out there, and we have cheap wireless devices, so why not make a Hitchhiker’s type guide? It could pull together zillions of things….maps, wikis, yelp reviews, and on and on. In the end, you’d have a crazy-complicated “copy” of the real world.

The web is kinda like that, but I see the web as a repository of data, mostly unorganized. Like a library with books intermingled. Imagine how hard it would be to find a book in a library like that? Maybe that’s why web searches seem to be getting more and more fruitless. We need organization.